protimewaster (u/protimewaster)

protimewaster commented on Google is killing first and second gen Nest Thermostats support.google.com/google... · Posted by u/eyeareque

ElijahLynn · 6 days ago

Damn...

And also,

> We’ll reach out to eligible users in the US and Canada for the Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) at a special price: $149.99 [219.99 CAD] (nearly 50% off).

However, we got a Nest from the Oregon Energy trust for $50 I think. So, not a great price.

protimewaster · 6 days ago

This kind of thing drives me crazy, and I think it helps to highlight some of the money-grubbing nature of the tech industry.

Years ago, you'd buy a cheap thermostat and it'd last 30 years or whatever. But the tech industry had to improve that by instead making them last less than half as long and cost substantially more.

I understand the idea that smart stuff is cool or whatever, but it feels like it'd be smarter if it lasted as long as the thing they're trying to replace...

protimewaster commented on A Case for Protecting Computer Games with SGX (2016) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/30... · Posted by u/turrini

eqvinox · 14 days ago

Don't you mean the Blu-ray Disk Association threw a wrench in the works by requiring a poorly designed, tested and implemented technology? It wasn't ever supported on AMD CPUs AFAIK, and viable attacks started 2017/18, just a bit more than a year into UHD BD availability…

protimewaster · 14 days ago

Yeah, that's fair. It was a completely stupid requirement from the association, even when SGX was available in consumer chips. And it was made even stupider by the fact that they seem to just be content to leave UHD blu-rays in limbo instead of coming up with an alternative that allows them to be played on newer hardware.

Hell, the people working on disc ripping software have been working harder to find ways to play the discs on modern hardware than the Blu-ray Disc Association has. The only option is to use unauthorized software to play the discs on modern AMD and Intel boxes, and that's the solution I guess?

protimewaster commented on A Case for Protecting Computer Games with SGX (2016) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/30... · Posted by u/turrini

zamadatix · 14 days ago

I think the biggest wrench in the works was just that UHD BD was effectively a dud due to streaming https://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/be/uploads/Screenshot_from_2025_0.... I think I hear/see more about it from pirating communities and notes about the death of SGX than actual players and disc in stores or friend's houses.

protimewaster · 14 days ago

I'm sure that's part of it, but, anecdotally, I've been finding more and more people lately that have started wanting movies and TV shows on physical media, including UHD. I think the market might actually be growing right now.

protimewaster commented on 'Ad Blocking Is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned by Top German Court torrentfreak.com/ad-block... · Posted by u/gslin

jasode · 14 days ago

>A direct analogy here would seem to be a newspaper publisher arguing that if a reader chooses to fold up the newspaper into an origami duck,

No, that type of manipulation isn't the legal argument Axel Springer is trying to use. It has nothing to do with re-using newspapers/books as birdcage liner, or fireplace kindling, etc.

Instead, Axel is focusing on the manipulation of the text/bytes itself (i.e. the HTML rewrite). A better direct analogy would be the lawsuits against devices deleting ads or muting "bad words" from tv broadcasts and movies. E.g.: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/06/child-safe-viewing-a

That's the legal angle they used to pressure ReplayTV to remove the automatic Commercial Skip feature from their DVR.

And yes, sometimes us nerds really want to slippery-slope those lawsuits into wild scenarios such as ... "But doesn't that also mean that when I shut my eyes at a tv commercial during a baseball game or go the bathroom during an ad it's a copyright violation?!?" .... No, the courts don't see it as the same thing.

Probably the more convincing analogy to justify ruling against Axel is the more prosaic "Reader Mode" in browsers that analyze HTML and rewrite it. Is Apple Safari Reader Mode a "copyright violation" ?!? I hope not.

protimewaster · 14 days ago

I wonder if it has different implications for different types of adblocking, then. A DNS-level block doesn't modify any copyrighted data, unless they're contending that the addresses returned by DNS servers are copyrighted. And that would seem to potentially pose major hurdles for the functionality of the internet.

I also wonder how it's made distinct from an addon that does something like block malware on a website. Surely that must be modifying copyrighted data too? Are some modifications allowed, I guess? Surely if something like an accessibility addon modifies the data, that's acceptable, right?

protimewaster commented on A Case for Protecting Computer Games with SGX (2016) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/30... · Posted by u/turrini

protimewaster · 14 days ago

I think it's interesting how much Intel threw a wrench in the works by killing SGX on the consumer chips. Official UHD blu-ray playback software was required to use SGX, so now no modern consumer machine can officially playback UHD blu-rays. I think all the payback software eventually deprecated UHD blu-ray support altogether due to this.

And any developments like the one detailed here also ended up being moot (at least in the consumer space).

Although, I'm not likely to cry over lost DRM schemes anyway, especially since games makers can't manage to preserve their games and have for years been relying on piracy for preservation.

protimewaster commented on Apple's Greed Is Finally Backfiring [video] youtube.com/watch?v=JUG1P... · Posted by u/greyadept

tyleo · 16 days ago

I find all this hyperbolic. Apple is dying because they are the third most valuable company in the world rather than the first? That’s a hard sell for me.

I’m sure they could have done some things better but they are hardly a dying husk at this point. Many argued the same for Microsoft as Ballmer laid the foundation for Azure and Enterprise that propelled them back to the top nearly a decade later.

protimewaster · 15 days ago

Logically, if the (formerly) most valuable company in the world was dying, somewhere on the way down they'd probably be the third most valuable company in the world. I guess the question is at what point they're "dying". Even if Apple dropped to the 50th most valuable company, they'd still be huge, but, at some point it might feel like evidence that they're dying even if they're still huge.

protimewaster commented on Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop tomshardware.com/pc-compo... · Posted by u/gjvc

protimewaster · 17 days ago

The excitement with Chia was really something else. It was supposed to be the "green" crypto, because crypto is in a bad enough state that "buying exabytes of hard drives" is considered the green approach.

I guess some people managed to make money in the very early days, but it's been a long time since it's made any sense as a profit-maker. Right now, 200TB earns you just under 26 USD/month. Who are these people that can afford 200TB of storage but need money so bad that $26/month is exciting?

protimewaster commented on Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription autoexpress.co.uk/volkswa... · Posted by u/t0bia_s

abcd_f · 17 days ago

> On top of all that, they’re awful cars.

They certainly aren't.

protimewaster · 17 days ago

It depends on what you want in a car. If you're expecting reliability like VW was known for years ago, you may well feel like the newer ones are awful.

protimewaster commented on Blurry rendering of games on Mac colincornaby.me/2025/08/y... · Posted by u/bangonkeyboard

galaxy_gas · 18 days ago

Its been across the board for me. Have ryzen 6xxx-8xxx mini PCs that are 45-60W and my 5 year old M1 Mini is comparable at a fraction of power draw

protimewaster · 18 days ago

I would think a low TDP Ryzen chip shouldn't be that much different. Were those the 15W TDP Ryzens?

protimewaster commented on That viral video of a 'deactivated' Tesla Cybertruck is a fake theverge.com/tesla/757594... · Posted by u/nosrepa

gamblor956 · 21 days ago

Reminded of all those times that Musk had Tesla release crash details on X pinning the blame on the driver when it was in Tesla's interest to shift the blame for crashes. Yep, great commitment to privacy there.

You know what automakers don't do that? Literally every other automaker. When they release those kinds of details, they do so in response to a court proceeding as part of the legal discovery process so that privacy concerns, etc. can be dealt with before the information is released.

protimewaster · 21 days ago

Plus, they supposedly had it turn off the automatic features just before it detected an imminent crash, ensuring that they could always correctly tell everyone that "Auto Pilot was off at the time of the crash". Of course, that doesn't mean that it wasn't used in the 20 seconds prior.

So, those details weren't actually insightful. They were just PR bullshit.